CHAMBER OF COMMERCE STILL IN THE LEAD

Organization predates founding of city itself by almost three decades

Long before Carlsbad was a city, there was the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce.

The chamber is celebrating its 90th birthday this year, which makes it almost 30 years older than the city.

Though there’s no one around today to remember, by all accounts the group took a municipal role in its early years.

An agenda for a 1926 meeting included items about street signs, tree trimming and an effort to open the Buena Vista Lagoon (then called the Kelly Slough or Slew) to the ocean because the stagnant lagoon smelled bad.

“There was no government to go to,” said chamber President and CEO Ted Owen, so the nascent chamber stepped in to fill the void.

Formed in 1923, the chamber attracted only a handful of members for its first few years. But by 1926, according to the chamber’s modern-day website, its weekly board meetings and monthly dinners attracted as many as 350 people.

The chamber has helped guide the community since. It spearheaded the effort that led to the city’s incorporation in 1952, wresting control from the county and avoiding annexation to Oceanside.

In more recent years, the chamber has lobbied hard for area-defining projects, such as Legoland, the Carlsbad Premium Outlets mall on Paseo del Norte and the Poseidon desalination plant being built alongside the Encina power plant.

The chamber is often the “go-between” in important community discussions, said Owen, a retired Marine and longtime businessman who has led the chamber for the last nine years.

“We took busloads of people down to speak at the Coastal Commission hearings” on the desalination project, he said. “You had to convince people that this was the right thing to do.”

The chamber also helped create the city’s industrial park, said Knox Williams, a chamber member since the early ’60s, something that has become a building block of the local economy.

Today the chamber has about 1,500 members, Owen said, making it the 10th largest of 900 chambers in the state.

It’s financially independent, he added; it takes no money from the city. It has an annual budget of between $1.5 million and $2 million, he said, with 47 percent of its income from membership fees and the rest from its programs and events.

The chamber has 11 full-time employees and one part-time, down slightly from 12 employees in 2008. The chamber will celebrate its 90 years with several publications and a number of events being planned, Owen said.